Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism's development. Capital in the advanced countries has outgrown the framework of national states, replacing competition with monopoly and creating all the objective prerequisites for the feasibility of socialism. Therefore, on the agenda in Western Europe and the United States stands the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for the overthrow of capitalist governments, for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Imperialism impels the masses toward such struggle, sharpening class contradictions on an enormous scale, worsening the condition of the masses both economically—trusts, rising prices—and politically: the growth of militarism, the increasing frequency of wars, the intensification of reaction, the consolidation and expansion of national oppression and colonial plunder. Victorious socialism must necessarily implement complete democracy, and consequently, not only must it achieve the complete equality of nations, but must also realize the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, the right to free political separation. Socialist parties that do not prove through all their activity now and during the revolution and after its victory that they will liberate the enslaved nations and build relations with them on the basis of free union—and free union is a lying phrase without freedom of separation—such parties would commit treason against socialism.

Of course, democracy is also a form of state, which must disappear when the state disappears, but this will occur only in the transition from socialism that has finally triumphed and consolidated itself to complete communism.